Paul Simon is dead and awaiting a glimpse of the divine. He's filled out the form and he's stood in the queue. The anteroom of the beyond, it turns out, is rather like the endless bureaucratic interzone of the living – at least on the second track on Simon's 12th solo album, a song called "The Afterlife". Eventually, Simon arrives in the presence of the Almighty. Attempting to describe the feeling, he flounders, unable to render the experience except as "a fragment of song". "A be-bop-a-lula," he offers, "Oh papa do." Pop's glossolalia frequently covers for more base acts than that of meeting one's maker, but here, Simon manages to grapple with mortality, spirituality and even banality, finding an answer to the ineffable in song. Rhymin' Simon at (nearly) 70? Still good, then.

Simon's first album in five years, So Beautiful or so What, examines the big issues with a lightness of touch, both in his lyrics and musical approach – a process the "songwriter-singer" (his preference) has refined over the course of five decades. Bombs explode in marketplaces and sons fight in far-off lands in these 10 songs, but these are passing references, tributaries to the flow of human mystery that Simon is attempting to chart.

He's ambivalent about Christmas on the album opener, "Getting Ready for Christmas Day", pondering both the wallet strain and "the power and the glory of the story". So Beautiful finds his wit characteristically dry and his heart sopping wet. "The Cat scan's eye sees what the heart's concealing," runs "Dazzling Blue", before its narrator turns romantic, marvelling that "you and I were born beneath a star of dazzling blue" and pondering marriage. There are three songs whose titles begin with the word "love"; the most urgent, "Love Is Eternal Sacred Light" reimagines the Big Bang as a kaleidoscopic effusion of colour. Later, the voice of God scoffs at the very phrase, then ruefully notes that no one can ever tell when He's joking.

As you might expect from the maker of Graceland, "Dazzling Blue" has African cadences playing off against Asian tablas; "Rewrite" opens with a flurry of kora, the Malian harp. The cumulative effect of this exotic instrumentation alongside Simon's guitar is breeziness, a spring aided by some milkman whistling and a relative lack of bass notes. And it swings, too. Simon's lyrics have been so obsessively examined that his unerring sense of propulsion is sometimes forgotten. So Beautiful clocks in at a lean and succinct 36 minutes and it ripples with momentum, even on "Amulet", a relatively sober instrumental.

A great many of Simon's contemporaries – Dylan and Neil Young, to name but two – have grappled with the most un-rock'n'roll business of growing older and taking stock. In turns playful and gently profound, Simon doesn't regard the future with dread or the past with regret. He re-emphasises the need for love, a good time and a sense of perspective. When we are all gone, he notes three-quarters of the way through this lustrous record, no zebra will shed a tear.